The Tech Gap

Scan & Populate Gains Traction – now on A and A side, too!

If you’re a regular reader or have attended any of my webcasts or live seminars you probably know of my passion for the technology now known as “scan and populate” --- I term I coined back in 2006 when the concept was first being developed. Well, I’m here today to tell you “the ship in in”! The technology is now being offered by many vendors with new products rolling out regularly. As you might guess the best products out there are those that hit the market earliest.

The market leader is Copanion’s GruntWorx which is now marketed by the AICPA’s CPA2Biz affiliate. They were formed in 2006 and now offer a very full and rich stable of capabilities including a newly released “gather” function and direct populate functionality to GoSystem Tax RS, UltraTax, and ProSystem Fx Tax. This is great news for UltraTax and ProSystem Fx users as the GruntWorx service is most definitely superior to the “in suite” products offered by Thomson Reuters and CCH.

As mentioned above both Thomson Reuters and CCH have “in suite” products but the general feeling among users has been that the “best of breed” products (i.e. GruntWorx and the SurePrep product 1040ScanPro) are far superior. And just last week Intuit announced their third attempt in this market with a product dubbed “Tax Import”. (Their original 2007 product was pulled for poor performance and in 2009 they private-labeled the Copanion product inside of Lacerte.)

Also announced last week was the first “A&A-side” product: ScanWriter from Personable. This product extends the “scan & populate” concept by scanning bank and credit card statements and populating Quickbooks directly with the applicable data.

In the 70’s and 80’s we moved almost all “pencil work” to a keyboard --- and it looks like the first few decade of this century may well be remembered as those when we moved from key-punch to scan (or gather) and populate.

Smart firms will get to know these products very soon. Smarter firms are already using them!

gll

Don’t Talk to Me in that Tone of Text!

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who admit to having been irritated or insulted by an email, and those who lie and say they haven’t. I know you’ll be absolutely shocked to hear this --- but even I have accidently pissed people off by the “tone” of an email! [Really --- it’s true!] Until today I had a two step process to avoid “sounding” rougher than intended. Step one is to leave every email on my desktop for a few extra minutes so I can re-read it before it’s sent. Sometimes it’s judicious to extend the time to a few hours --- and occasionally even to overnight. Step two involves admitting that sometimes email just isn’t the proper medium and picking up the phone for an actual phone call. Today I discovered a new tool that may well jump in front of step 1. ToneCheck is an Outlook add-in that identifies and flags emotionally charged sentences within email messages. Its editor helps you adjust and preview the emotion in your message before sending. It utilizes an automated flagging device that notifies you when you hit that sometimes pesky  "send" button. If [when] an e-mail falls outside your acceptable tone tolerance, ToneCheck jumps up and saves you --- giving you a chance to redeem yourself before it’s too late. With over 165 BILLION emails and 50 MILLION tweets sent every day it’s safe to say at least SOME should be scrubbed a bit, If you think a few of “those” messages might be yours --- ToneCheck just might be for you.

Oh --- it’s my favorite price, too. FREE!!

gll

PS: Very interesting whitepaper here. Eye opener. You’re stupid and lazy if you don’t read it now. 

Ya Gotta Love a Sense of Humor .....

I have long been a big fan of Fujitsu scanners --- you'll have to pry my ScanSnap from my cold, dead fingers! But who knew that the Fujitsu team, in addition to making a darn good scanner, also has a darn good sense of humor, and can actually have fun in their marketing efforts? What more can I say? At 2 minutes, this video is shorter than a full episode of "The Office" --- and darn near as funny!

NOTE: I’ll be visiting the Fujitsu booth as I’m leading the CPE Vendor Walking Tours at the Midwest Accounting & Finance Showcase next week in Rosemont, Illinois. If you’re attending the show please come and join us!

gll

And Then There Were 5 ...

The Intuit Commercial Hosting Program which was so laboriously dribbled out over the past several years (see related post from February, 2009) now has 5 “authorized commercial hosting companies” with Xcentric and Real Time Bookkeeping recently being added to the originally three “anointed” vendors. As the requirements are published it becomes clearer that this certification is not for the feint of heart. Intuit collects a $5,000 annual renewal fee + $5 per-user, per month --- and that’s on top of a nearly $20,000 initial fee with some fairly onerous technical requirements including a SAS-70 Type-II certified Tier 1 data center, physically located in the United States, with all hosting infrastructure and processes accredited by MSP Alliance. The list of authorized vendors is as follows:

• Right Networks. www.rightnetworks.com Telephone: (888) 417 4448
• InsynQ, Inc. www.insynq.com and www.cpaasp.com Telephone: (866) 206 1781
• Uni-Data & Communications, Inc. www.unidatait.com Telephone: (718) 445-5600 x3180
• Xcentric www.xcentric.com Telephone: (678) 297-0190
• Real Time Bookkeeping www.realtimebookkeeping.com Telephone: (888) 869-0076 

[WARNING: Firms wishing to host QuickBooks for their clients MUST apply for the Self-Host Program. That program fee is only $200 per year and requires only a written agreement with your clients governing their use of the hosting services; but you are limited to 200 clients and 400 users --- over that number you must apply for the “Commercial Hosting Program”.]

gll

Is Shoeboxed a Solution for Your Shoebox Clients?

Shoeboxed.com is a service that seems to be growing quickly in popularity and I think it might be useful for practicing accounting and tax professionals. The service is simple: users send receipts and documents via postage-paid envelopes or camera phone. They scan and data enter the documents, then organize them in a secure, searchable online account. The bottom line is that you can eliminate crinkled, unorganized or lost receipts, and you can eliminate data entry. Once receipts (and business cards!) are processed they are ready to be viewed, printed, emailed, downloaded, or exported. You can transfer them to PDF (with receipt images), Excel, Quickbooks, Bill.com, Freshbooks, Evernote, and to a CSV format. You can also download business card contacts to CSV, which can then be imported to Outlook, Salesforce, Gmail, etc. The resultant downloadable report is quite well organized and cleverly hyper-links every document reference. Download Shoeboxed -- sample expense report

A bonus here is that they pay out commissions for referrals – so you might have an opportunity to clean up a few “shoebox clients” AND get paid for it!

gll

TaxWise Rolls Out iTransact Partnership

CCH’s Small Firm Services brand, TaxWise, has partnered with iTransact, which provides payment processing for businesses. TaxWise says iTransact will analyze your clients' merchant account statements and show you how your clients  can save money. iTransact then works directly with the client and provides the practitioner online access to the merchant accounts their participating clients.

Gene Goldenberg, VP of Marketing, says the partnership offers a needed service to small practitioners, adding that the arrangement provides very attractive pricing and world class service that might not otherwise be available to smaller firms.

NOTE: I’ll be visiting the CCH Small Firm Services booth as I’m leading the CPE Vendor Walking Tours at the Midwest Accounting & Finance Showcase later this month in Rosemont, Illinois. If you’re attending the show please come and join us!

gll

Another Big Laptop Improvement ….

Several readers commented to me regarding yesterday’s post on Soluto. Some suggested that an SSD (solid state drive) may well be the best boot time improver of all. For example, my friend Dan Druker, SVP over at Intaact writes: “The biggest improvement I’ve ever made to my laptop is installing an SSD (solid state drive) instead of my hard drive.  Between Windows 7 and the SSD it is just a pleasure to use – and I have a junky 3 year old Thinkpad.  I don’t often recommend this kind of stuff, but I gotta tell you it’s the best $300 you will ever spend on personal productivity.   All you do is copy your current hard drive over to the new SSD, and it’s like you have a brand new laptop. Not only is boot time less than 30 seconds (for me), but applications just snap open, search is instant, etc … the productivity gains pay off super fast.”  Dan suggests the Intel 2.5-Inch 160 GB X25-M.

The 160GB drive might seem like a step down in size but as we move more and more to the cloud we need less and less local storage, right?

Good suggestion …… thanks, Dan.

gll

Want to Get the Boot --- Faster?

Well, not exactly “get the boot”, but get your COMPUTER to boot. We’ve been complaining about long boot times for decades and although Microsoft has improved boot times significantly in Windows 7 it’s still annoying to wait. Now there’s a solution …. sort of.

Soluto.com says it’s "Anti-Frustration Software" and its sole purpose in life is to improve your computer’s boot time. To accomplish that it tracks the applications that load as you boot, and helps you identify the time eating culprits..

You install the software (it’s free and in beta now at www.Soluto.com) and reboot your PC, Soluto does its magic and identifies every program that runs during the boot process, and then provides a simple interface so you can easily see exact times for each one. To make it easier to understand what processes can be removed, the applications are grouped into "No-brainer" or "Potentially removable" groups.

I managed to chop 57 seconds off the boot time on this test machine …. not bad. Now if I could just figure out a way to save 57 HOURS …..

gll

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NOTE: I’m back from my self-imposed 60 day hiatus and will be again posting regularly. Thanks to all of you who enquired!

gll